Remembering The Old Songs:

THE STORY OF CHRISTMAS CAROLS

by Bob Waltz

(Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, December, 2010)

[DISCLAIMER: This entry doesn't follow the usual Remembering
The
Old
Songs template, but I found it interesting and decided to
include it here. Bob sent the following disclaimer:"I threw this together in almost no time -- it was looking as if I
had a big hole in the December issue, so I grabbed the Oxford Book
of Carols and a few other things on my shelf and slapped it
together in about three hours. Then the hole proved smaller than I
thought, so a whole bunch of stuff had to come out, which rather
destroyed what little continuity it had."
I wouldn't mind being able to write failures like this.]

This is the time of year when everyone gets together to sing
Christmas carols. But what is a Christmas carol? I've seen a surprising
amount of misinformation on this point. This isn't the last word on the
subject -- I threw it together in a couple of days. But maybe it will
help a little.

For starters, Christmas song and carol are not
synonyms. Of
common Christmas songs, the one with the oldest roots may be the Veni
Emmanuel, which J. M. Neale translated in the nineteenth century as
O
Come, O Come, Emmanuel. The Latin goes back at least to the
fifteenth
century, and probably (based on the copyist's handwriting) to the
thirteenth. Johnson's book suggests it goes back to the seventh
century. But the Veni Emmanuel is not a carol, and never was;
it is now
used as a processional hymn.

The definition of a carol has nothing to do with Christmas; it is a
form of dance song. The Oxford Book of Carols, p. v, declares:

The word
carol has a dancing origin, and once meant to dance in a ring;
it may
go back, through the old French caroler and the Latin choraula,
to
Greek
choraules, a flute-player for chorus dancing, and
ultimately to
the choros which was originally a circling dance and the origin
of the
Attic drama.

The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship, p.
148, more
cautiously defines the carol this way:

In common use, the name given
to a type of simple, traditional, essentially rhythmic song.... Obscure
in origin, the term has been conclusively traced only so far as the Old
French carole.

A classical musician has another meaning. Grout, p. 153,
would have
us know:

Another form of English composition that flourished in the
fifteenth century was the carol. Originally the carol, like the
rondeau
and ballata, was a monophonic dance song with alternating solo
and
chorus portions. By the fifteenth century it had become stylized as a
setting in two or three (sometimes four) parts, or a religious poem in
popular style, often on a subject of the Incarnation, and frequently
written in a mixture of English and Latin rhyming verses.... The carols
were not folk songs, but... [have] a distinctly popular character.

In
other words, if a normal person might sing it, it isn't a carol. It's
true that there were bilingual carols -- but, as the Oxford
book points
out on p. viii, the Latin was such as anyone could pick up in a
Catholic service. Grout's definition points to pieces such as the
Agincourt Carol mentioned below, but it's a technical term we
can
ignore.

There isn't even agreement on when the word carol started
being used
in English tradition. Chambers, p. 66, declares that:

The first mention
of a carole appears to be in the Anglo-Norman Wace's account,
about
1155, of King Arthur's wedding. Here the women carolent and the
men
behourdent, 'jesting' while they watch the performance.

But this is in
Norman French, not English. The New Westminster Dictionary
points to a
piece from around 1350,Honnde by hondde we shulle us take,
which
certainly sounds like a dance, but it is less clear that it is a carol
or was sung. It certainly isn't a Christmas carol.

One of the earliest carol scholars, Greene, came up with an even
earlier piece, Merie Sungen the Muneches Bennen Ely (Merry Sang the
Monks of Ely), which tells of King Canute (reigned 1016-1035),
although the manuscript containing it is dated from around 1300. I
frankly don't buy this; Merie Sungen is in Middle English, and
Canute
lived before Middle English existed.

The Oxford Book of Carols, p. vi, suggests that the carol
form dates
back to the fifteenth century -- in other words, about the same time
that the traditional ballads started to be produced.

Some other candidates for the earliest carol include:

The Golden Carol (Now is Christemas y-come, Father and
Son
together in one), from c. 1475.

The well-known Coventry Carol. It comes from what is
called the Coventry pageant of Shearmen and Tailors of 1591.
That date,
however,
is deceptive. Happe, pp. 19-22, points out that these Mystery
plays
came into being with the establishment of the Feast of Corpus Christi
in 1375; most were suppressed during the Reformation. We cannot date
the Coventry Carol, but it might be from before 1400. At least
three
songs with a Lullay chorus were taken down in the Grimestone
manuscript of 1372.

The Corpus Christi Carol. This very strange piece (The
heron flew
east and the heron flew west, She bare her over the fair forest) is
found in Richard
Hill's
manuscript from before 1537 and is probably
much older. It probably has something to do with the grail legends, or
the Fisher King.

The Agincourt
Carol (Deo gracias anglia, Redde pro
victoria. Owre
kynge went forth to Normandy). This is, as far as I can tell, the
earliest firmly-dated piece called a carol. It celebrates Henry V's
unprovoked attack on France which led to the English victory at
Agincourt in 1415. Henry V, being excellent at playing the Christian
King, demanded that no songs be written praising him for the victory;
he officially gave credit to God. So some clever minstrel wrote a piece
which gives thanks to God — and then talks mostly about the King. The
song was probably written in 1415 or 1416.

Note that, apart from the Golden Carol, none of these is
associated with Christmas, although all but the Agincourt Carol
are on
Christian themes. This has continued through the ages: The Ritchie
Family of Kentucky sang the May Day Carol. It has been
suggested that
one of my favorite melodies, My Dancing Day, is a combination
of a
secular dance song with a religious story.

Some carols aren't even Biblical. The well-known Cherry Tree
Carol
probably derives from the non-canonical (indeed, slightly heretical)
Gospel of the Pseudo-Matthew; the story it tells, believe it or
not, is
first found in the Quran! It is debatable whether The
Carnal and the
Crane can be called a carol, but it tells many apocryphal stories
as
well -- the roasted cock that crows before Herod to say that Jesus is
born, the adoration of the beasts, the miraculous harvest that fools
those who are chasing the infant Jesus. The Bitter Withy goes
even
more against modern attitudes, for it shows the young Jesus
miraculously drowning other children who taunted him.

There was another sort of folk Christmas song known in Britain
starting before the Middle Ages: The Wassail. Wassail
is a
worn-down form of Was hael, a wish for good health. During
Yule,
Wassailers would go about seeking food and drink. You've probably heard
Here We Come A-Wassailing. There are also Wassail songs such as
the
Somerset, Gloucester, and even Kentucky Wassails. Many of these
probably go back to a single original, but they have drifted far.

The Oxford Book of Carols says that the first carols to be
printed
were published by Wynken de Worde (the apprentice of England's first
printer Caxton) in 1521, but we have only a tiny fragment of one copy,
so we don't know much about what was in the book.

The Puritans who won England's Civil War in the 1640s tried to
suppress the carol -- indeed, they tried to suppress Christmas! But
most
of their humorless ideas blew away in a puff of smoke after the
Restoration of 1660. This did largely suppress the publication of
carols, but the people continued to preserve them and presumably create
new ones.

For centuries, the carols were mostly the property of the folk.
Scholars finally noticed them in the first half of the nineteenth
century. It was Davies Gilbert who brought out the first modern carol
book, the Collection of Christmas Carols of 1823. Much more
important
was Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern, published by William
Sandys in
1833. This remained a major source for a century. The last word on
English carols remains the 1928 Oxford Book of Carols, which
has almost
all of the classic British songs. Attempts to replace it have been,
flatly, failures; there is, for instance, a New Oxford Book of
Carols,
but it's the work of a classical type and shows neither the musical
skill nor the skill in selection of the original Oxford Book.

There is no equivalent American source, although the Seeger family
recording American Folk Songs for Christmas features a fine
variety
of songs.

Most modern Christmas songs are not carols -- e.g. Silent Night
is
not in the Oxford Book. The phrase Christmas carols probably
came to
be used for all Christmas songs because Christmas was the one time
carols were still heard. (Plus, of course, there was that book by
Dickens....) But even if the modern songs aren't carols, they have
become a tradition. And isn't it nice to see some sort of tradition
surviving in this day and age?

Bibliography:

E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle
Ages,
Oxford, 1945, 1947

J. G. Davies, The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and
Worship,
Westminster, 1986

Grout: Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music, revised
edition, Norton, 1973